WOOT!
At these prices - I can go back to jack-rabbit starts, burnouts, and best of all- I might just buy Robosaurus and put him back on the touring circuit! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1EujkBF-U
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WOOT!
At these prices - I can go back to jack-rabbit starts, burnouts, and best of all- I might just buy Robosaurus and put him back on the touring circuit! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd1EujkBF-U
Our local transit system was recently touting how "brilliant" they were to lock in a "great" price on diesel fuel... Only to watch prices drop to half that level two months later. If only they had listened to those evil, greedy commodities brokers who told us it was only a temporary spike...
Now they are once again hiking fares and cutting service in order to continue paying on a contract they can't get out of. Brilliant, indeed.
Gas is definitely lower, but you still don't save any money.
Even though diesel has gotten significantly cheaper, the consumer is still paying the costs companies incurred while it was at $5/per.
So yea, it only costs me $30 to fill up the car now, but I'm still paying $12 for meat that used to cost me $8. And also, airline ticket prices are steadily climbing.
Save it at the pump, spend it at the store. The fuels that cost consumers the most are the kind we can't go to the Exxon station and put in our cars.
I hear the recession is so bad, women are now marrying for love.
Geez, what a downer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blakk_Majik
I got it for $1.89 the other day in the city (where it's usually higher than other areas). Weeeee
I'm going to go out and drive around in circles for a few hours for no reason.
There is a station in Benton, PA selling it for 1.85 today.
$2.43 for 91 premium :woot: Took just under $40 to fill my tank :thumb:
i remember a few years ago it was down to $0.99. i think i was about 6 years ago.
I think it was a bit further back, about 8-9 years seems about right.
No i dont think so. 1999 i was in 2nd grade.... maybe it was... I must have been in at least 4th grade.
I remember that I was in Idaho, and had been there for at least a little while, but was still up north. I moved there in 1997, and left there in 2001, so it had to be somewhere in that window. I don't think it was 2001, so 1999 or 2000 seems like the latest possible years.
There was a severe economic downturn due to the 1997 Asian market crisis that drove world demand for oil down considerably. Oil dropped to $8 a barrel in 1998 and I remember filling up in East Liverpool, Ohio in late summer '98 for 79 cents a gallon.
That falls into the window I was remembering. I don't think we got under $0.95/gal, but Idaho usually trails the rest of the country (except for CA).
correction, it is 9/10ths of a gallon... not a full gallon...Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
african or european gallons?
Anyway there's a station local to me selling for $1.59/gal. I was wondering why i had christmas money this year...
It's a little overboard though on everything else. Two of us spend about $250 a month on groceries and i only eat at home 2 days a week. I get free food at the restaurant i work at.
As of last night, gas is selling at $1.45/gal around my way.
Took a whopping $21 to fill up the Impala last night. Hard to believe that just a few months ago, it was three times that amount.
I need to hurry and do some traveling before the credit markets unfreeze and oil speculators once again drive up the price by betting with borrowed money.
Edit: As of now, the price has dropped to $1.41.
hurry! get a huge tank and fill it with gas and store it in your garage!!! now! all of you! then you can sell it from your garage when prices inflate again, and make big bucks
Gee all this reminiscing takes me back to the days when it was .29 cents a gallon. Now how many of you can top that!
Gallons....learn to use real volume units! :D
during high school i worked at a gas station and remember Gas Wars and pumping ethel for .19 / gallon. those gas wars were funny compared to today's.
I was just a kid in the early '70s so I never looked at gas prices until the Arab oil embargo when gas went from 25-30 cents to 50+ overnight. It seemed people complained about it a lot more back then than they do now. Of course most of us were driving giant cars back then, too...Quote:
Originally Posted by CoachBarker
Ah then you and dbasnett remember the good old days of odd and even also. I remember it so well, because for less than $5.00 we could get 5 gallons of gas and oil for our snowmobiles. Back then they were just comong out with the snowmobiles that you could pull up to the pump and fill. Of course they were a little pricey and out of our range.
it was the beginning of the end back then. The us government mandated fuel economy for the first time ever, and the automakers had never even attempted to get good economy up to this point. As a result they totally screwed up the engines they already had instead of developing new ones (and i was a mechanic up until a few years ago, i know what i'm talking about). The same engine in 1976 that produced 400 horsepower (a 460 big-block) produced 290 in 1977. And for you chevy fans, the 454 was similarly tuned. Ironically, 1977 was the year of the record automobile sales. So for the longest time, there were more mediocre cars on the road than anything else. We actually sold used cars for a while, and out of 15 cars on our lot (counting personal cars) four of them were built in 1977. The average gas mileage for all cars on the road (according to epa) actually peaked in 1987. The problem is the consumers not buying the good-mileage ones.
Considering by the official site www.fueleconomy.gov, the ford escort was getting over 30 mpg in city and nearly 40 on the highway, can you explain why today's cars SUCK!?
the stations here in San Antonio range from about $1.60-$1.80 (the gas at my local H.E.B, a Texas-wide grocery chain sells for $1.67).
It used to be like 89 cents a gallon in St. George, Utah.
"Gee that old LaSalle Ran Well... Those Were The Days!
-Archie Bunker
The Escort got 35 on the highway - comparable to the Ford Focus of today.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Orwell
So there have been marginal improvements, but I would venture Electronic Fuel Injection was still the big fuel economy hat trick of the day.
Because engine technology has stagnated... rather than trying to come up with something new that runs more efficiently, they would rather try to make the cars lighter and smaller to reduce weight to give the appearance of fuel economy. I saw a commercial recently that touted a truck with the "best" fuel economy for a truck.... at 20mpg ... ON THE HIGHWAY! .. now I don't know about anyone else... but most trucks aren't doing much highway traveling... most are being used to haul stuff around town.... so 20 MPG highway doesn't impress me much...And I bwet that was empty towing/hauling weight too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Orwell
-tg
that's actually not really a function of the engine on a truck. It's more directly related to the gearing a truck has for more torque. We replaced the engine and transmission of our own truck with a car's engine and transmission. The result? Our 1972 Ford went from 14MPG to 20MPG. Overdrive makes a huge difference in this, as well as standard vs automatic. I think a big issue here is the automatic transmission. Due to torque converter slippage, as well as all the fluid pumping and general heaviness, plus a lower gear ratio on the top gear, automatics generally get 10 to 20 percent less gas mileage than standard transmission vehicles do, all other things being equal. The Yaris and the SCION are two modern-day examples of this. The 4-speed auto scion with a 1.6 litre gets 36 highway, while the manual transmission gets 41. Back in the late 70s and even early 80s, automatics were an expensive option. Today, the opposite is true.
We Americans are much too busy trying to hold a cellphone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other (and I'm sure there's a cigarette in there somewhere as well) to bother with something as trivial as shifting gears.
But all sarcasm aside, it would be a royal pain in the you know what to have to shift gears in rush hour traffic. I'm all for more fuel economy, but the amount of work that would go into driving a manual home at 6pm in the evening far outweighs the marginal gain in effeciency. It wouldn't even benefit me on the highway, since I generally use a rental when I travel (screw putting all those miles on my own car).
You are right on about the early 80's though. Even though I was still young, I do not remember riding in a single car that wasn't manual. Then, I remember around the mid 90's I was in awe that people drove cars and didn't have to shift any gears. So yea, the automatic is now the norm and the standard is no longer the er..standard. Seems manual is now reserved for sports cars or drivers that wish to take the time to find one and pay the premium to drive a "stick".
And on the subject at hand, gas continues to hover around the $1.50 area, although it's been $1.49 the past week or so.
Yay, just paid $2.15 a gal for 91 premium. Less then $30 to fill the Cobra :thumb: Going racing Thurs so it will be empty after that lol
Srsly? I've never had issues with that.... in fact, that's usually the easiest part.... stick it in second, and release the clutch..... and jsut let the engine take it from there..... no brake, no gas.... traffic jsut creeps along at a steady pace....Quote:
Originally Posted by Blakk_Majik
sometimes I have to doqwn shift into first to keep from slamming into the bugger infront of me.
-tg
Driving manual for the win!!
yeah, you can usually start out in 2nd in a standard with no issues. And as for shifting, you don't need a clutch after you're moving. synchros make gear shifting easy.
Can someone explain to me why crude slid 9% yesterday, yet gas prices went up? Huh? Did I miss something in the news?
When I went home last night, the pump was at $1.49. On my way to work today, noticed the price was now $1.55. This makes NO sense.
how about the old 1st to 3rd shift, 3rd to 5th shift.
i learned to power shift in my buddies Yenko Deuce (Chevy Nova, 350 ci, 375 hp, 4 bbl, 4.11 rear end). drag racing on the four lane on friday nights!
when i was really sick my sister drove me to the doctor in my truck. down shifting escaped her.
yep you missed something. Thanksgiving. Don't forget about supply and demand. Everyone travelled over the weekend and they knew it was going to happen so they raised gas prices in preparation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blakk_Majik
But the price didn't move before Thanksgiving.
Take a look at the date of my post, yesterday at 8am. Which means Monday night, of this current week, the price was still at $1.49. It did not rise until yesterday morning. This rise in price does not correlate to the Thanksgiving holiday, since most people were home on Sunday night to prepare for work on Monday. Hence the reason I'm so confused as to why the price jumped now.
When you hear reports of "the price of oil" they mean oil futures on the commodities markets. It takes a while for the price of gasoline to follow the price of oil.
maybe not where you live. But it went up 20 cents a gallon the day before thanksgiving where i live. Maybe your station was behind the times.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blakk_Majik
It's dropped to £0.89 a litre here. :)
IF traffic creeps at a steady pace! More often than not, one encounters stop n' go traffic, where you would constantly have to keep punching in the clutch, and taking it into neutral, then back into 1st.Quote:
Originally Posted by techgnome
Perhaps drivers wore their clutches out too fast - and then the lasting impression was the car couldn't handle abuse and that the clutch was cheaply made - affecting the image quality of the automaker - and automakers would have a hard time slapping a 100,000 mile warranty on a mechanical drivetrain part that has such user interaction.
An Automatic transmission on the other hand can be programmed to shift with the proper timing to reduce wear on the engine and transmission - and and with faster speed than any user could shift a manual transmission.
I have an automatic now, and I still like having my right hand on the shifter, even though I only ever use it to hold the transmission in 3rd a bit longer when accelerating from stop-lights before letting it go to 4th (Drive).
i used to be a mechanic and i have never personally had to ever replace a clutch in my own vehicle. However we put a brand new clutch in a toyota we sold and the woman brought it back two weeks later. She had managed to physically break one of the springs completely out of the clutch and it was lodged in the pressure plate so the clutch wouldn't ever release fully.